


Curl

by Seefin



Category: Blue Crush (2002)
Genre: F/F, Friendship, Malibu, Romance, Surfing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 12:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16137521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seefin/pseuds/Seefin
Summary: It didn’t matter anyway in the end that Eden had gone to such great lengths to avoid her, because Anne Marie walked into the coffee shop five minutes later and joined the end of the short queue. She was holding a bag from a bridal store, and Eden guessed she was finally getting married, and didn’t exactly know how to feel about that. She’d kind of held out hope that if Anne Marie ever got married Eden would get an invite to the wedding, because they’d known each other for such a long time and had lived together and been pretty good friends. If Eden were a teenager she’d maybe say they’d been best friends, but she wasn’t, and also she didn’t think 'best friends' was a real concept.





	Curl

Eden was in L.A., hot and sweating, dusty from her workshop and the grime in the air and on the street, when she saw Anne Marie Chadwick emerge from the bright-white doorway of the _Paul Smith_ on Melrose. She was wearing a pale blue shirt with thin white stripes, just as blonde as ever, and Eden developed the sudden urge to hide behind a potted plant until she was gone, which was the dumbest thing ever, but she did it anyway because she hadn’t seen Anne Marie in almost three years, was still the type of person who wore a bathing suit as underwear, and irrationally felt like Anne Marie would be able to tell about the bathing suit, and would care.

Anne Marie hadn’t ever been that kind of person before, but she’d never shopped at Paul Smith before either, or wore slacks, or straightened her hair, all of which Eden could tell she did now, because she watched Anne Marie frown down at her phone for almost a minute before she dragged herself away from her hiding spot and crossed the street, ducking her head all the while, then bolted to the coffee shop where she was supposed to meet her agent.

It didn’t matter anyway in the end that Eden had gone to such great lengths to avoid her, because Anne Marie walked into the coffee shop five minutes later and joined the end of the short queue. She was holding a bag from a bridal store, and Eden guessed she was finally getting married, and didn’t exactly know how to feel about that. She’d kind of held out hope that if Anne Marie ever got married Eden would get an invite to the wedding, because they’d known each other for such a long time and had lived together and been pretty good friends. If Eden were a teenager she’d maybe say they’d been best friends, but she wasn’t, and also she didn’t think 'best friends' was a real concept.

“Eden,” her agent said slowly, and snapped his fingers in front of her face, like she was stupid, or a dog.

“Don’t fucking do that,” she told him, and he rolled his eyes. His name was Jeff, and he looked exactly like a talent agent in a cartoon would look like. He liked to wear dark pinstripe suits even though it was summer, and sweat through them at the armpits.

“You weren’t listening,” he said, like that was a real excuse for snapping your fingers in someone’s face. “Sometimes I feel as though you hate the idea of ever getting a job or making any money.”

“I obviously don’t,” Eden said, distracted again. Anne Marie was ordering, her back to Eden’s table, gesturing at the board above the cashier's head. She was probably frowning, the way she usually did when she concentrated or was thinking about what to order in a cafe or what flavour pop-tart she wanted for breakfast. Even if Eden hadn’t just saw her outside on the street and recognised her and saw what shirt she was wearing, she would have known her. They could have been in a pitch-black crowded room and Eden could have heard her laugh and her ears would have pricked up and she would have thought _hey, that’s Anne Marie’s laugh, I’d know it anywhere._ And also Eden had stared at Anne Marie’s back enough times over the course of her life that she had it memorised pretty well. It was kind of weird actually, but she hadn’t had to think about how weird it was in three entire years.

“It’s not at all obvious,” Jeff protested. “You’re literally doing it again right now, can you just pay attention? We meet once every two weeks it’s not like, some huge commitment on--”

Eden stood up, and went over to the counter where Anne Marie had just finished ordering, and was putting her wallet away in her purse. It looked like a men’s wallet, and Eden knew that it was in fact a men’s wallet, and she knew too that Anne Marie had had it for thirteen years, since she’d stolen it from her ex after she found out he was sleeping with like three other girls.

“He’s fucking cheap anyway,” Eden had said, counting through his cash, after Anne Marie had come home and thrown the wallet down on their kitchen counter for them all to gather around and look at and contemplate what a shitty thing the cheating had been to do.

_"Who would cheat on you? "_  Eden had thought, but hadn’t said, because Kai had, and Micah, and bringing it up would have been shitty. None of the boys Anne Marie ever dated had seemed to realise she was the best person on the planet, but they were boys, so they wouldn’t have.

_“Maybe it’s-- men,”_ Eden had also thought, but she’d stayed silent about that too because back then Anne Marie and Lena and Penny hadn’t known about her being gay, or maybe they had, but they’d never talked about it in any case.

“Eden,” Anne Marie had said, not wanting to laugh, back then, and she said it now in the coffee shop too, surprised and -maybe, it seemed like- pleased. “Oh my god,” she said, and then before Eden could do anything she was being hugged, and Anne Marie’s pointy chin was on her shoulder, and Eden thought desperately about whether or not she’d put deodorant on that morning. “What are you doing in L.A.?”

Eden didn’t really know what to say. The truth was she wasn’t doing much apart from making boards again, like she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, because it was easy and made her feel lazy and unambitious. It didn’t matter that they sold better than they had in Hawaiʻi, that she was making real money now for the first time in her life, she wanted-- something else, she thought there _had_ to be something better out there for her, something _more_. She couldn’t say all that to Anne Marie though, partly because it sounded silly and partly because she thought maybe Anne Marie was only asking to be polite, so instead she said, “Oh, you know, I’m pretty much just here to surf.”

Anne Marie gave her a speaking look. “Here?” she said, in her most sly tone of voice, her mouth lifting at the corners, and of course she hadn’t been asking to be polite; Anne Marie had never done anything just for the sake of being polite, how could Eden have ever forgotten that? “Seriously?”

Eden laughed, it was all she could do. “Well,” she admitted. “No, actually, I guess not.”

*

Anne Marie was right about the surfing. L.A. sucked in general, everyone there apart from maybe about ten people sucked, the weather sucked, but Eden could have put up with all that if not for the fact the surf sucked too, and even on the days when it wasn’t so bad you still had to fight your through a thick wall of people just to get out beyond the breakers, and then had to claw and yell your way onto one of the rare good waves.

There were too many men too; that part wasn’t so different from Hawai’i, but they were worse somehow, more blonde, more annoying, less respectful because they didn’t know her yet, and when she got angry all they did was laugh, like they thought she was _funny,_ like they thought she wasn’t serious or was trying to get attention or— _something,_ she didn’t _know_ what they thought, and she hated that the not-knowing bothered her so much but it did, and they knew that she was bothered and that made them laugh harder, like all the men she’d ever met. She put up with it though. You could make yourself something in L.A., if you wanted. And Eden wanted.

“Oh,” Anne Marie said, the first time she came over to Eden’s house in Seal Beach, running her hand over the board Eden had up on the rack, only half-shaped.

Eden lived in a bungalow, a lot like the place they’d used to live back when they lived together, and her workshop was at the back of the tiny garden, just beyond the hot-tub that had been broken when she’d moved in. There were two low windows at the back of the shed, and through them you could see the golden sand of the beach spread out in front of them, and a sliver of blue-white ocean. The more important thing was that she could hear the crash of waves, and the silence in between each one as it spilled over the sand. When she’d first moved to L.A. she’d lived seven long streets away from the beach, and the silence used to keep her up at night. It felt a little bit like her heart had stopped beating, being so far away from the water.

“What?” Eden said. She was embarrassed that Anne Marie had asked to see her workshop. When Eden had invited her over she’d thought-- she hadn’t known what she’d thought, but she’d cleaned the whole house and bought pink wine and made potato salad from scratch the way her mom had used to in preparation, so she must have thought _something_. She’d not thought to clean the workshop though, so there was sawdust everywhere and three bikinis hanging up to dry in the corner and an open pizza box on the counter from two days ago with a bunch of crusts inside that Eden hadn’t wanted to eat. So while Anne Marie ran her hands over the board on the rack, Eden stood in the doorway trying not to cross her arms, wondering when she’d want to go back into the house and drink the wine.

Anne Marie blushed faintly. “I’d forgotten how it smelled when you were working on a board.”

“Oh,” Eden said warily, feeling as though she was missing something. “Is it-- it’s just wood.”

“I guess,” Anne Marie said, shrugging, and then shook her head. “It reminds me of getting up in the mornings before work and coming to get you and you’d be there covered in dust looking up at me like I’d just woken you up from a great dream. Like, as soon as I smelled it I knew we were going to go surf. It was basically pavlovian.”

Eden watched her as she circled the board. She wasn’t wearing slacks today, she was instead wearing a summery-looking dress with spaghetti-strap sleeves, and had her hair tied back in a pony. Eden probably shouldn’t have been so surprised that Anne Marie remembered all that stuff, but she was anyway, because Anne Marie looked like a completely different person now. She ran her hand over a ridge on the board that Eden still needed to smooth out. “I liked it when you made me boards, too,” she said, finally looking up.

“You can have this one if you want,” Eden said, impulsively. She used to say that to Anne Marie a lot, and always got taken up on her offer.

“You probably have other orders,” Anne Marie said reluctantly, and Eden could tell that what she really wanted to say was, “Okay.”

“Not that many,” Eden lied gently. “Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s a longboard,” Anne Marie said. “I don’t-- I haven’t used a longboard in forever.” 

“I can make you a shortboard,” Eden said, going over to the shelves on the opposite wall. “We can do whatever you want, I have some cedar--”

“I kind of haven’t surfed in forever,” Anne Marie said in a rush, and Eden turned to stare at her.

“Why not?” she asked. It didn’t make sense. An Anne Marie Chadwick who didn’t surf was like-- well, Eden didn’t know what it was like, it wasn’t like anything, it didn’t seem real.

“I fell out of it when we moved here,” Anne Marie said, and she was talking about Matt. She’d not spoken about him before now. Eden kind of wanted to ask if they were getting married. “The surf is-- fucking terrible.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Eden replied.

“I don’t even think that it is, is the thing,” Anne Marie said. “I’d get up at five and go out onto the deck and look at these baby waves and think like, what’s the point, you know? And then I’d go back inside and not bother.”

Eden blinked at her. “It’s not the Shore,” she agreed, even though it kind of went without saying. Nowhere was like the Shore, nowhere was like Hawai’i.

“It’s not pipe,” Anne Marie said, and they were both silent for a moment.

“You can have the longboard,” Eden said eventually. “And I’ll take you to a spot I know, when it’s ready.”

*

“Do you even _exist_ outside of Hawai’i?” Lena had said once, a few weeks after Eden had moved away. She’d called her from a payphone outside the cafe where she’d been working at the time. Penny had picked up. It had been nice to hear her voice.

“Apparently,” Eden said, kind of stung.

“I just can’t imagine it,” Lena said. “First Anne Marie, now you, off in the big wide world without me.”

“At least you still have Penny,” Eden had said.

“For now,” Lena had responded darkly, and then spent the rest of the call gleefully talking about how she’d walked in on a couple fucking in their hotel room earlier.

Eden spent a lot of time thinking about what she’d said after that, when she was walking to work, and home from work, and to the ocean to eat dinner on the beach. Maybe she _didn’t_ exist outside of Hawai’i; it did kind of feel that way sometimes, but then other times it sounded pretty dramatic, even in her own head.

Then Eden decided maybe she just didn’t exist without Lena and Penny and Anne Marie.

*

It turned out that Anne Marie had been buying a bridesmaid’s dress, that time when Eden had first run into her, and she laughed uproariously when Eden finally collected up the courage to ask her if she was engaged.

“No,” she said, breathless. “Oh my god, no. My friend Beth is getting married and she asked me to get this awful green dress and I look like a fucking pine tree, you’d love it.”

“Are you and Matt still together?” Eden asked, fiddling uselessly with the stereo in a way she hoped made her seem casual. They were driving out to a State Park in Malibu, their boards strapped to the roof of Anne Marie’s 4x4.

Anne Marie glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, and then swiftly looked back at the road. Then she reached over and moved Eden’s hand away from the stereo, her grip light and awful and impersonal, so much so that Eden would almost have preferred to be clamped down on, hurt.

“No,” Anne Marie said, more serious now, her lips pursing. “I have the worst fucking taste in men, as it turns out.” 

“I could have told you that,” Eden said, before she could stop herself, but Anne Marie didn’t look upset.

She snorted, of all the things, and said, “You have, actually, many many times.”

Eden felt very sorry, all of a sudden. It was true that she used to be insensitive with Anne Marie, and for all the times she stopped herself from making comments about the men Anne Marie used to date there were a hundred more times where she didn’t manage to. “It was never you,” Eden said. “It was always them.”

“I think that might be overly generous,” Anne Marie told her. “I did steal from them a lot.”

“They all deserved it,” Eden said, leaning her head back against the hot leather headrest, turning to look out of the window past Anne Marie’s head, the ocean so blue it didn’t even look real, as though it was fresh new paint sparkling on a door frame.

Anne Marie didn’t say anything for a while, but when she did her voice was kind of sad. “You always thought I was a better person than I actually am, Eden,” she said, and Eden didn’t know how to begin to respond to that.

“So you stole sometimes,” she said. “It’s not that big a deal, sorry I don’t think you’re a criminal.”

“That’s not at all what I mean,” Anne Marie said, “And you know it.”

Eden didn’t know it, actually, whatever _it_ was, and she was just about to argue when the lady on the GPS said they were at their destination, and something inside her sat upwards and alert at the sound of the sea, so she dropped it even though she didn’t want to.

They changed silently on opposite sides of the car and then walked down to the water together, a little out of breath by the end of it; solid wood boards were heavy, but Eden didn’t know how to work with anything else, and didn’t think she’d want to even if she _had_ known. Wet sand shifted under their feet, the air changed direction, and they plunged themselves into the water without even having to talk about it, wading up to their thighs before getting on their boards to paddle out, the taste of salt heavy in the air.

Once they were both past the breakers they paused for a moment to catch their breath. Anne Marie was grinning, tanned, shining in the sunshine, and Eden ached for her so desperately that her chest hurt, and had to turn away before she did something stupid. She couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Anne Marie didn’t have a fiance, didn’t even have a boyfriend anymore, and how that made her feel awful and hopeless and hopeful all at the same time.

“Okay,” Anne Marie said, and for a split second Eden thought-- thought she was somehow saying _okay, go on then, if you so desperately want to,_ but she was only tilting her head back to look up at the clear, open sky, at the birds wheeling above them. “This was the best idea you’ve ever had.”

*

Eden called Lena again that evening, her hair still crisp from the salty water, her muscles aching. “It happened again,” she said, when Lena finally picked up.

“Oh god,” Lena said. “Oh no, not again.” 

“Maybe I’ll-- ask her out this time,” Eden said, although she knew she never would.

“Oh good,” Lena said. “I love that idea, you should do that.”

“Do you think she’d say yes?” Eden asked, wretched.

Lena sighed. “I have my own things going on, you two do know that.”

“She-- did you talk to her?” Eden said.

“I have a UTI,” Lena said desperately, “let’s talk about that instead now, please, my god, I can’t go on like this.”

“ _Yo_ _u two,_ ” Eden thought to herself. “Okay,” she said out loud. “Is that one of the contagious ones?”

*

“My agent says--” Eden started, but was rudely interrupted midway through.

“You have an agent?” Anne Marie’s friend asked. Her name was Hannah, and she was incredibly pretty and well-dressed, and looked exactly like a girl Eden had dated secretly in high school. Dating was probably the wrong word for it, since all they’d done was make out a few times in her living room while her parents made dinner in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Eden said. “He’s an asshole, but he says that most of the people he represents have like two jobs to sustain themselves on the side.”

“Why do you have an agent?” Anne Marie asked. She was pressed close against Hannah in the booth, and they were sharing a single margarita, using a single straw.

“I-- why does anyone have an agent?” Eden asked, deliberately obtuse. It was a silly question. She had an agent because she needed someone to book her for commercials.

“You do have a look,” Hannah said knowledgeably.

“He said that too,” Eden told her. She’d had a margarita all to herself, and two whiskey sours before that.

“Oh my god, you’re a model,” Anne Marie said, blinking. “Eden, what the fuck.”

Eden looked at her, thinking she was serious, but her mouth was turned up at the corners. Eden wanted to kiss her right there, where her lips met her cheek. “Don’t you think I have a look?” she asked, mostly just to torture herself.

“I mean, unquestionably,” Anne Marie said, but the way she blushed added a level of sincerity to her statement that Eden didn’t quite know how to process. They stared at each other.

“Hm,” Hannah said, looking between them. “I’m going to pee.”

“Okay,” Anne Marie said absently, and let her out of the booth. She looked at Eden right in the eyes. “So,” she said, “the boards, that’s just a side thing?”

“Yeah,” Eden said. “Not that many people want to use solid wood boards anymore, and I’ve been thinking about maybe getting some more equipment in or doing some sort of vocational course with-- fibreglass, I guess, but it doesn’t seem worth it.”

“Uh-huh,” Anne Marie said. She’d cut her hair since the last time they’d hung out; it was back at her shoulders again.

“Your hair looks really good,” Eden ventured.

“Nothing at all about our lives has turned out the way I thought it was going to,” Anne Marie said, looking at Eden the way someone might look at a bomb that was about to go off. Eden kind of knew what she was talking about. Anne Marie had worked in a Neiman Marcus for the last year, and only surfed when Eden dragged her out on weekends.

“How did you think they would turn out?” Eden asked.

“I guess I thought we’d either be really famous and successful surfers, or we’d spend the rest of our lives working in that hotel,” Anne Marie said, then made a face. “Or any other hotel, I guess, if I’d kept getting fired every two months for insubordination.”

“Oh,” Eden said. “We? Like, you and me?”

“Yeah,” Anne Marie said, oddly sincere, not even really looking at her. “We make each other better.”

Eden didn’t say anything for a moment, waiting for Anne Marie to say, “And Lena, of course,” but she didn’t. “Lena too,” Eden said, out of loyalty.

Anne Marie looked at her then. “Eden,” she said.

*

At Eden’s house, in the dark, they took their shoes off, and their jackets, and bumped into the couch a few times, and didn’t think to turn on the light. They stumbled into each other, laughing, and then Anne Marie was so close that Eden could feel the stutter of her breath against her lips, and could hear it when Anne Marie’s breath caught in her throat, could almost sense it when she smiled, the way she’d always been able to.

Eden couldn’t see much of her, only the pale silver curve of her cheek in the moonlight. Anne Marie didn’t say anything, and neither did Eden, and she didn’t know how it happened but all of a sudden they were pressed close up against each other and kissing slowly, warmly, generously, and Anne Marie’s hand was in the small of Eden’s back, moving up and down ever so slightly, as though she was nervous.

Eden wanted to say: _What made you want to kiss me now? Is it because I said I had an agent? Is it because your friend said I had a look and you’d never noticed it before but then, once it was pointed out to you, it was all you could see? Is it because you’re disappointed at the way your life is going? Do I remind you of home?_

Eden kissed her harder, and let Anne Marie back her against the couch and step in between her legs, nervous no longer. Eden broke away for a moment, and put her lips on the parts of Anne Marie’s face she’d always wanted to kiss: the side of her nose, her eyelids, her jaw, and then put her teeth around her left earlobe. Anne Marie jolted, then laughed at herself and pressed her thigh right up against the crotch of Eden’s trousers. She undid the buttons on her own shirt, one by one. They were going to go to bed together, it was a surprise, Eden hadn’t worn very nice underwear.

Eden wanted to tell her: _You do know we can still be famous or successful and get up every day in the dark to surf, or work in a hotel and have interesting stories like Lena does, right?_ because she thought maybe Anne Marie somehow didn’t know that.

But it could probably wait, they were both busy; Anne Marie smelled faintly of perfume, and she tasted faintly of margaritas, and as they kissed she held the back of Eden's head in the palm of her hand.


End file.
